Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Politics

Jean Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134707874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Aristotle's Politics is widely acknowledged as a classic and one of the founding texts of political theory and philosophy. Written by a leading expert in ancient philosophical thought, Aristotle and the Politics is a coherent guide that makes sense of an often difficult and disorganized work, carefully explaining its key themes. Jean Roberts introduces and assesses:

• Aristotle's life and the background to Politics
• the ideas and text of Politics
• the continuing importance of Aristotle's work to philosophy today.

Aristotle is one of the most important figures in Western thought and Politics contains some of our earliest ideas about democracy. This is essential reading for all students of philosophy and political thought.

1
INTRODUCTION

He spoke with a lisp, had small eyes, and was discovered upon his death to have owned many dishes. So Diogenes Laertius, whose third-century Lives of Eminent Philosophers is our best source of ancient bibliographical information as well as of ancient trivia, tells us about Aristotle. He was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, the son of a royal Macedonian physician, named, as Aristotle’s son was to be, Nicomachus. He spent about twenty years at Plato’s Academy in Athens, reportedly leaving Plato’s school out of annoyance that Plato’s nephew Speusippus was appointed Head after Plato died in 347. Whether because of ancient academic politics or not, he did leave Athens at that time. During the period of about twelve years that followed he was reputed to have been the tutor of the young Alexander, later to be the Great. He also during that period probably gathered, working primarily from Lesbos, most of the data that informed the biological writings for which he was later to be renowned. He returned to Athens in 335 and established his own school at a public walk in the Lyceum, where he and his pupils supposedly walked while conversing, hence earning the description “peripatetic.” The school, along with Aristotle’s books, was left in the hands of his student Theophrastus when he died. His will, it is also reported, ordered that his personal slaves be freed, although not immediately upon his death. One tradition has it that he fled Athens in 323 when the death of Alexander caused a flurry of anti-Macedonian feelings that led to his being indicted on a charge of impiety, saying, referring of course to Socrates, that he was leaving in order to prevent Athens from “sinning twice against philosophy.” He died in 322, a year after Alexander.

Even the relatively small portion of Aristotle’s works reported on the ancient lists that remains to us (thought to be about one-fifth) are astounding in their volume and range. He collected volumes of information about animals, categorized and described what he learned precisely, and gave careful thought to how animals viewed as structured living organisms were to be explained. He did the same for plants, thus inventing the science of biology, although not the notion of it, since he didn’t classify the study of animals and the study of plants as part of the same inquiry. He also thought systematically about the different psychological capacities, or different kinds of souls, that distinguished different types of living beings from each other. He was a sophisticated mathematician, and made enormous strides in physics, which for him was the general study of natural objects, that is, basically anything non-artificial composed of form and matter and having an internal source of change. He wrote on aesthetics and rhetoric, as well as on logic and explanation. And all of that is leaving aside his still influential metaphysical writings, and the moral and political ones. He had both a clearer conception of the lines between different areas of inquiry and a more coherent integrated picture of the entire universe than anyone had had or perhaps ever would again. He probably knew everything any human being, at least in his part of the world, knew at the time that he lived. Seventeen centuries later Dante accurately described him as “the master of all who know.”

If any of his interests can be taken as the central or defining one, especially if the defining is, as is traditional and seems natural, relative to Plato, it is surely the interest in biology. One of the very few touches of genuine eloquence to be found in any of our surviving texts comes in a heartfelt plea early in the Parts of Animals (644b21–645b1) to look for and see the beauty in all animals. While still Platonist enough to admit the superiority of the ungenerated and imperishable natural objects (planets and such) he seems almost contemptuous of anyone put off by the appearance of animals. Even the ugliest ones, he suggests, have a kind of beauty, and are thus a source of enormous pleasure for those who have come to understand and appreciate the arrangement and working of their parts in light of the life of the organism as a whole. While a passionate interest in the nature and kinds of animals does not perhaps logically lead to a rejection of the Platonist metaphysics comfortable for those who see mathematics as the basic science, it certainly provides a kind of push by temperament toward the more empirical. Although Aristotle is beholden to Plato in all sorts of areas and in all sorts of ways, the disembodied abstract forms of his teacher are replaced in their role as the most real components of the universe by individual natural substances, of which animals clearly seem to have held the most fascination for him. Hence the clichéd comparison familiar from Raphael’s depiction in The School of Athens of Plato pointing upward and Aristotle downward (or at least middle-ward) does in fact capture something of importance both about Aristotle’s official metaphysics and about his stronger orientation toward the empirical. Animals and other natural objects were not the only subjects of Aristotle’s research. He also was responsible for a descriptive history of the constitutions of Athens, which, along with parts of the Politics, has made him an unparalleled and invaluable source for ancient political historians. The same broadly empirical stance shows up in the Politics. Both earlier political thought and existing examples of political arrangements are seriously examined. In both cases the focus is not simply on how coherent they seem theoretically, but on how well various arrangements work in practice. The positive proposals put forward, which are aimed to a significant degree at ordinary and quite imperfect cities, are openly based on historical and psychological information of all sorts.

Some of Aristotle’s works have, of course, retained their philosophical appeal and plausibility over the centuries better than others. Admirers of Aristotle have a much easier time with his ethical writings, which can seem not only the most approachable and congenial of all his works but in some respects a positive improvement on, and at least the equal in sophistication to, modern and contemporary work, than with the Politics, which seems on the whole distant and sometimes downright abhorrent. The fact that he famously defends slavery and doesn’t even see a need to defend the subordination of women puts him out of touch with us. But these are hardly views there is any surprise in finding coming from an ancient Greek. Somewhat more surprising, or at least less predictable simply on the basis of temporal and geographic location, and for that reason more disappointing, is his less than fully admiring attitude toward democracy. Discomfort or disappointment with the Politics on these grounds is no doubt exacerbated by its having been written in Athens, the birthplace of democracy. It seems so obviously fitting that one of the great philosophers of ancient Greece should have been an articulate and profound defender of democracy, and Plato is clearly out of the running. Aristotle is, without a doubt, less hostile than Plato, but there is plenty of room between being less hostile than Plato and being the champion one looks for, and Aristotle is rather closer to the former than to the latter.

There are nevertheless lessons to be learned here about differences between ancient and modern democracies, or, perhaps more to the point here, ancient (such as it was) and modern democratic theory. The classical Greek polis about which Aristotle was still writing was a far smaller and probably unimaginably more intimate community than any modern democratic state. Aristotle is able to suggest, and one presumes he does this without it sounding ridiculous, that ideally a city should be small enough for all the citizens to be familiar with each other (Politics 1326b11–24). He offers no estimates, but surely did not have in mind anything larger than Athens at the time. All estimates about ancient Athenian population numbers are very highly speculative, but it is thought that Athens, by well before Aristotle’s time, had roughly thirty thousand citizens. Although the details are, again, sketchy, Athens was by that time democratic in the sense that all non-slave free males born of citizen parents were citizens, earlier property qualifications for citizenship having been abolished. Decisions were made primarily by a citizen Assembly, which every citizen had the right to address. It met about forty times a year, with as many as six thousand in attendance. There were also a large number of metics, or resident alien non-citizens. They had no political or property rights and only attenuated legal rights. On the other hand, they had many regular citizen duties, and were apparently often well assimilated into Athenian cultural life. Aristotle is undoubtedly the most famous Athenian metic. The male citizens were probably outnumbered, and perhaps by quite large numbers, by male non-citizens, that is, by metics and slaves. The slaves, in turn, greatly outnumbered the metics. Almost all civic offices, except a few very high-level military and financial positions, were filled annually by lot. There was pay for jury duty and for attendance at the Assembly. Hence, neither Plato nor Aristotle in rejecting democracy, insofar as each does, was rejecting a political and economic system much like any of ours today. Nor could democracy then have been justified in the ways we would now justify it. Enlightenment notions of individual liberty and autonomy were still in the future. These sorts of differences are worth noting and understanding, both for their sheer historical interest and for what we can learn, by way of contrast, about our own political assumptions.

There is at least a touch of irony, as well as material for reflection, in our differing contemporary responses to the content of Aristotle’s ethical writing and to the content of his political writing simply insofar as Aristotle himself saw them as very much part of the same work. Aristotle did divide ethics proper, the treatment of the condition of soul or individual character that constitutes excellence or virtue and happiness in an individual, from politics proper, the consideration of the social or political arrangement that constitutes excellence or virtue and happiness in a city. Nevertheless, the Nicomachean Ethics is written as the prequel to the Politics, in at least the superficial sense that its closing chapter explains the need for the discussion of the topics that are taken up in the Politics. The link is far from superficial, however; these are not simply two separate areas of inquiry that both need to be covered, as might be thought by someone believing that philosophers ought to say something about both private and public life or private and public morals, or about both individual virtue and institutional justice. Ethics and politics will turn out to be very much two pieces of the same inquiry in the sense that they have the same aim, and are constituted by the same expertise. Indeed the Nicomachean Ethics (1094b11) describes itself as engaged in a “kind of politics.” Political inquiry encompasses private life, and an individual’s life and virtue are described in light of that individual’s place in the political community.

This connection appears early on in the Nicomachean Ethics. The work begins by noting that all inquiry and all action aim at some end conceived of as good.

Every expertise and every inquiry and likewise every action and choice appears to aim at some good, for this reason the good is rightly said to be that at which everything aims. There are differences among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from activities. In those cases in which there is an end apart from the activity, the products are by nature better than the activities. Since there are many actions and kinds of expertise and knowledge, so too are there many ends.

(Nicomachean Ethics 1094a1–8)

These general remarks about ends are preparatory to the surfacing of Aristotle’s main question here: what is a good or happy life? Many immediate ends are in fact merely means, as when someone aims to get to the market in order to get food to eat. Sometimes means are desired only as means and sometimes they are desired also as ends, as when someone walks to the market both to get food and for the pleasure of walking. Sometimes the end is a product of sorts, at other times it is an activity, as with the food on the one hand and the walking on the other. The more important point is that both kinds of ends, both products and activities, tend to be embedded in chains of ends that are means to other ends; one can keep asking why something was wanted. Aristotle finds it uncontroversial that those chains must end somewhere, that is, that there must be something that is straightforwardly desired for its own sake, thus putting an end to questions about why it is wanted, and making sense of the undertaking. If everything were chosen for the sake of something else, our desire would be “empty and in vain” (NE 1094a20–21). He thinks it also uncontroversial that the chains all end in one place, with happiness (eudaimonia), which is understood as living well or doing or faring well (NE 1095a19–20). The end of the chain of explanations for any human action will come with an appeal to the desire to live well. The ultimate explanation for any purposive human action will be that it is conceived by the agent as either constitutive of, or a contribution to, a well-lived life. (Why are you walking to the market to buy food? You walk because it is a pleasant spring day and pleasure is good. You also walk for the exercise because exercise contributes to health and being healthy, rather than being ill, is also part of living well. You buy food for nutrition and hence health. You also perhaps buy food to give dinner to your good friends, because you want to give them the pleasure of a good meal, and because you enjoy each other’s company and conversation, and this way of spending time is a part of how you want to live your life.) It was important to note initially that some ends are activities, because the ultimate end is one. The happiness or eudaimonia aimed at is a lived life, and hence an activity rather than a product.

Although the very general and rather vague conclusion that all human endeavor aims at happiness or eudaimonia, understood as living well, is easily arrived at, an accurate conception of the nature of that happiness is another matter. The real question is what that eudaimonia is and how it is attained. Somewhat more formally: “If there is some end for the sake of which we do everything we do, we should try to find out what it is, and of which of the sciences it is the object” (NE 1094a18–26). This is a claim that can seem almost banal: we should figure out where we’re going before we set out; we should define any target we really mean to be aiming at; if you claim to care about the quality of your life (and who doesn’t?) you should think about what a good life is in order to be in the best position to actually live it. The further claim though about this being a matter of science or expertise is far from trivial. Aristotle does mean to say that there is a fact of the matter, and therefore knowledge to be attained, about how human lives ought to be lived. Whether or not any individual or community is living a good life is not a question to be answered by asking that individual or that community, but by philosophical inquiry. Not only is there a straightforward fact of the matter about what the best life for a human being is, something which is then the object of knowledge and the subject of some kind of expertise or science, but that science is politics, literally something like “the science of the polis,” or “the study of the city.”

There is thus here a fairly quick move from the purposiveness of all distinctively human activity (all inquiry and action aims at some good) to the study of the political community as the way of finding out how all that purposive activity ought to be undertaken and directed. Although an explanation of sorts can be found in the text this does not seem to be a move that Aristotle felt a pressing need to argue for; one gets no sense that he thought there was anyone disagreeing with him, or at least not anyone worth attention in this context. The connection between eudaimonia as the acknowledged, if only vaguely specified or murkily understood, ultimate end of all human action and eudaimonia as the subject matter of politics, taken as the inquiry about goodness in cities, is made from both directions. The eudaimonia at which everyone aims is made the subject matter of politics both by looking at characteristics of politics as a science and by looking at characteristics of eudaimonia as an end.

It is a general feature of branches of inquiry or sciences or kinds of expertise, Aristotle thinks, that they can be subordinated to each other in clearly hierarchical relations. For example, since bridles are fashioned with the aims of the rider in mind, bridle-making as a craft is subordinate to horsemanship as a kind of expertise. Because the riding is undertaken for military aims, horsemanship is in turn subordinate to military strategy. Because the reason for fighting is the defense of the polis, the good of the political community, military strategy is in turn subordinate to politics. The more final, or the further along the chain, any end is, the more final will be the science that studies it. Aristotle seems then to move from the fact of the final end, eudaimonia or happiness, along with the assumption of it being the subject of expertise, to the conclusion that it must be the subject of the science that fits its status as the final end, that is, the science to which the ends of all other kinds of knowledge or expertise are subordinate. The final and ultimate end of all action will then be the object of some equally all-encompassing and directing science. Politics (or political science or statesmanship) is taken by Aristotle as having authority over everything that happens in the city. “Since it uses the other sciences and legislates what should be done and not done, its end must contain those of the others, and so its end must be the human good” (NE 1094b4–7). This all-encompassing role for political science may well have seemed so obvious to Aristotle that it was just assumed. He certainly generally conceives of politics, by which he has in mind the practical knowledge or expertise about the city that properly enables the one having it to rule and govern, as far broader-reaching in its aims and concerns than we now conceive of political science or political philosophy as being. Correlatively, he thinks of ruling or governing as also farther reaching. He thinks, for example, of law, one of the products of political science, as covering all action; thus making it easy for him to identify the lawful with the virtuous (NE 1129b19–24). Alternatively, he might have inferred the authoritative position of political science relative to other kinds of expertise from the structure of human ends that is parallel to the structure of inquiry. The thought might then have been that because all endeavors aim ultimately at a single final end, eudaimonia, there must be some equally final area of inquiry, and the study of the city could easily seem like the only viable candidate. However arrived at, the claim is clearly that the ultimate explanation for all intelligent purposive human action, or the human good, or that for the sake of which we do everything we do, is the subject matter, as well as straightforwardly the aim, of politics.

This is also to say something perhaps even more puzzling to the modern ear, that what each person aims at, when properly understood, that is, what each ought to aim at, is the good of the city. This is the beginning of the story, not a conclusion for which Aristotle thinks he needs to argue. Aristotle has said, and quickly and without fanfare, that the happiness or good life that any person aims at is the subject of politics, which in turn aims at the good of the polis, or city, as a whole. This merging of individual and civic good does not figure much explicitly in the description of the good and virtuous life that follows in the Ethics, but it underlies throughout and resurfaces at a few crucial points. For example, when Aristotle has concluded that happiness or a good life is the complete and sufficient end, being all that anyone can want, he pauses to point out that he does not have in mind the happiness of a single person. The happiness desired and thus delineated is not that of an isolated individual but in the end that of a political community of fellow citizens, since humans are not the sort of beings who could live good lives in isolation. The happiness each desires is in fact the happiness of family and friends and fellow citizens “since by nature man is political” (NE 1097b11). The explanation of the political nature of humans is not given in the Ethics but in the Politics; here it is simply referred to in order to get the right formal specification of the end aimed at. Aristotle is not claiming here that all who desire to live a good life or to be happy as a matter of fact do desire the happiness of the whole community to which they belong. He is only saying that if happiness were to be correctly identified, as it usually is not, all would understand their own happiness to be bound up with the happiness of others. This shows that the good life even when described in terms of the character of an individual is still being conceived of as the life of someone fully embedded in a political community. It is thus not entirely surprising when practical wisdom (phronēsis), the intellectual component of character virtue, which is at one point described as being good at deliberating about the good for human beings in general (NE 1140b7–11), is said to be identical with political expertise. From the other side, the aim of political science is to make citizens good (NE 1099b29–32). Hence the final end of all human action, the subject matter of political and ethical inquiry, is the happiness or virtue of the members of the political community. It is hardly surprising then that the virtues described in the Nicomachean Ethics are the virtues of political creatures, of citizens. Since this is the conception of virtue assumed by the Politics it will be useful to have at least a general idea of the Aristotelian ideal life for an individual before turning to the Politics.

As mentioned, Aristotle begins by identifying the final end of all human action with happiness or living well. That by itself is of minimal practical use, since the difficult question is what happiness or living well really is. Several popular candidates are quickly dismissed (NE 1095b14–96a10). The life devoted to the pursuit of mainly physical pleasure, being the sort of life a non-human animal could live, or being at least the sort of human life that fails to exercise to the fullest the sorts of rational capacities unique to humans among animals, is dismissed as unfit for human...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ruling the household
• 3 Justice
• 4 The scope and aims of political philosophy
• 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography